‘The Strain': Guillermo del Toro vampire series renewed for Season 2

The apocalyptic horror series “The Strain” will return for a second season, FX announced Tuesday.

Based on a trilogy of novels by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, the show is the latest high-concept thriller to explore the end of modern civilization — here, the threat arrives on board a flight into JFK when an old-world monster steals away on the plane and infects the passengers with a virus that transforms them into blood-thirsty monsters.

Corey Stoll’s CDC epidemiologist Eph Goodweather finds himself drawn into the unfolding chaos, and before long, he is forced to partner with an eccentric pawn shop owner, Abraham Setrakian (played by David Bradley), to face down the creatures.

“The thing I wanted to do in ‘The Strain,’ you can actually see this world collapse in a week,” Del Toro said in an interview with Hero Complex earlier this year. “If the circumstances are right, the world could collapse in a week. If we lose all our digital and all our electronics and the right acts of terror occur, the world could collapse very fast.”

“The Strain” premiered July 13 as FX’s entry into the arena of marquee genre television that has proved such a tremendous boon to the network’s rivals AMC and HBO with their respective series “The Walking Dead” and “Game of Thrones.”

The first episode, which Del Toro directed, became the most-watched premiere in the history of the channel with 12.7 million total viewers, and it has continued to perform well, ranking as the top new cable series among adults 18-49.

“It’s very hard to make people believe in the supernatural, including vampires, but if you ask anyone about a pandemic, they get almost superstitious about it,” Del Toro said. “You can scare people by saying there’s a viral threat, they put paper masks on — it’s almost like a spiritual fear of contagion. So it was a good way to treat the vampires.”

The first season of “The Strain” is set for release on DVD and Blu-ray on Dec. 2.